Single Point Links posted in September 2009

A 20-year lease certainly says something about the Alouette’s confidence that Percival Molson Stadium will be a profitable home for them. Another 50,000 tickets sold next year when seating jumps to 25,000 should mean another $1.5 million towards their bottom line.

Details on the park aspects of the Lansdowne plan, focusing on the debate over the multi-use hard-surfaced open park area that is to serve as park and parking lot. Frankly, I would eliminate these 380 overflow parking spots and create a real park. Multi-use in these extremes ends up being poorly suitable for either need and the 380 spots for “special” events is not worth it.

Ian Busby apologizes for questioning the CFL for putting double header Sunday games against the first two weeks of the NFL season. The fact is the CFL held its own on Sunday. Canadians, the media included, have been raised with an inferiority complex so when the message that the CFL‘s problem is it can’t compete against the NFL is repeated enough, they never question or look for the facts to prove it. Shown the truth, they are a little surprised, despite their favour for the Canadian contest. It is the this repeating of ingrained rhetoric that has no basis in fact from CFL fans and detractors alike that the CFL must overcome.

A national group to better support football and former players in Canada. Being involved with the CFL association may appeal to more players from recent years since more and more players do not play their whole career with one team.

Between three-quarters of a million and one million viewers of each CFL game this weekend. This confirms what I’ve held for years — the old survey methods have been short changing the CFL (and all sports).

the protest by-law is not meant to correct on-field officials bungling of a game (instant replay was supposed to do that).

That said, hopefully the following lessons are learned:

Using pagers to notify officials of play reviews was asking for this to happen. What about having the time-keeper running onto the field, a buzzer or some other notification through the sound system so there is no doubt from anyone in the stadium regarding the timing?

Worrying about the proper clock setting before a play is not that important (certainly not important enough to create this kind of fiasco) when you can just add the time difference at the end of the next play.

The injustice to Montreal was that they had to replay their third down play three times (once because of a late time-out, once on the touchdown play that was nullified and finally on the official third down play they were stopped on). However, early reports indicated there was a penalty against Montreal on the nullified play which would have required it to have been replayed anyway (with the appropriate penalty yardage). Interestingly, this was not mentioned in the protest decision statement, so apparently there was no penalty against Montreal on the play.

Great to see the CFL get this done and out of the way and not wait until next week.

Not surprisingly, the mentioned possibilities of a 40,000 sq. ft food store, 15,000 sq. ft. book store, sporting goods store and cinema are labelled as big box by the opposition, even though the neighbourhood two-storey look is maintained. Where do these people shop? I’m sure it is not all in 5,000 sq. ft. independent shops. If they want to turn that tide, they need to time travel back 20 years, for that battle is lost.

Never heard about this until now — kudos to the Lions organization for condemning this. Leave it to commissioner Cohon to go beyond this incident with his statement “... we respect our opponents, we respect our game, our league, and ultimately, our fans.”

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